Thursday, May 14, 2009

Recently Twitter changed their policy for which messages to show in the regular stream of messages to each user. Previously users could choose if they wanted to see @replies (messages that start with an @ sign followed by a user name) or not. With the recent change this is no longer a configuration option, but all users now don't see @replies directed to people they don't follow. The motivation for this is of course that these messages really are directed at someone else, that you are not interested in.

A lot of people got upset with this, with the main motivation being that @replies is a good way to find interesting connections and people.

I did not notice the change until everyone (yes, everyone) started ranting about wanting it to change back to the old behavior, since I had turned off @replies a long time ago. Why did I turn it off? Because a lot of people use Twitter as yet another IM service, and those messages have a very low signal to noise ratio to me. Before I turned off @replies I got about 3 times as many tweets in my stream, and more than 90% of these were not interesting to me. Even with my current stream without @replies there is more noise than signal, but the ratio is such that I can find the tweets I'm interested in.

One interesting thing that I noticed with the recent change was that peoples twittering mentality changed (This applies only to the people I follow, a tech heavy crowd. I have not done, nor do I intend to do, forther investigation of the phenomenon). All of the sudden the signal to noise ratio got much better. I was away from twitter for about a day, a little over 20 hours. When I got back I had less than 100 new tweets in my stream. Normally 20 hours yield more than 120 tweets. There were also more interesting links than usual, I have 13 tabs open with things I want to read. I.e. almost 15% of the tweets contained links that looked interesting, compared to the usual 5%. A lot of the other tweets were interesting to, I estimate the noise ratio to be about 30% for this period of time. Interestingly the tweets that fall into the noise category are mostly either rants about how bad it is to not get @replies or from the past few hours when people started add stuff before their @replies to force them to be visible.

Conclusion: Twitter, please keep the current behavior for @replies. Or if it changes back, make the current behavior default (I'm not unreasonable).

Disclaimer: I haven't done the actual statistical calculations for this. It would be interesting to do, and post a few charts, but there are a lot of interesting things to do, and I don't have time to do all of them. Therefore the figures in this post are just from the general feeling I get from my Twitter stream.